The Posthumanist Child: Pharmakon and Collodi’S Pinocchio

The Posthumanist Child: Pharmakon and Collodi’s Pinocchio LINDSAY BURTON The childlike elements of deconstruction—deconstruction’s suggestion of play—have heretofore been largely unremarked upon in scholarly discourse on Derrida. The power of the child in children’s literature scholarship has been similarly suppressed in the name of ‘aetonormativity,’ which norms adult power while subverting that of the child. In light of the posthumanist turn in critical thinking, which demands a dissolution of binaries in favor of heterogeneity, deconstruction offers a novel approach to analysing the child in children’s literature. Derrida’s deconstruction, utilised in tandem with Donna Haraway’s diffractive thinking and Karen Barad’s concept of material-discursive apparatuses, promises a new, authentically posthumanist way of reading the figure of the child in works of fiction for children. This article traces the edges of a literary figure I term the posthumanist child, arising from the application of a deconstructive reading of aetonormative literary structures. I posit that revealing the posthumanist child in a work of children’s literature—here, Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio—destabilises its internal didacticism and allows for a ‘rethinking’ (Spyrou 433) of childhood. I argue that this rethinking is particularly necessary in order to align ideas about childhood with contemporary posthumanist and new materialist thinking about binaries and their dissolution, an alliance that has been avoided in recent children’s literature criticism. Children’s literature abounds with posthuman figures—talking animals, endearing robots, sentient trees— and much has been said about the posthuman-ness of these figures and their particular location in texts for children (e.g. Jaques; Flanagan, Technology; McCulloch; Tarr and White). What interests me, and what is at stake in the measurement of a posthumanist child, is an inherent contradiction between theories of posthumanism and of children’s literature that persists despite the clear presence of posthumans throughout the genre. My emphasis above indicates an alignment with Victoria Flanagan’s distinction between the posthuman and posthumanism: ‘Posthumanism’ is the critical discourse that seeks to understand and dismantle the privileged status of the humanist subject, whereas the ‘posthuman’ is the subject who exists in a world where the boundaries that once defined humanity have been redrawn as a result of technological impact or the recognition that the human is of multi-species origin. (“Rethinking” 35) As a discourse that intends to ‘dismantle the privileged status of the humanist subject’, posthumanism concerns itself with power binaries and their dissolution, championing heterogeneity instead of ‘reproduc[ing]…the sacred image of the Same’ (Haraway, “Promises” 67). The power binary in question in children’s literature studies is the binary between the adult and the child, termed aetonormativity, an ‘adult normativity that governs the way children’s literature has been patterned from its emergence to the present day’ (Nikolajeva 8). The discourse of aetonormativity extends to include: social conditions, in real as well as in fictive world (sic), [in which] adults are and will always be superior to children. Here, power hierarchy is non-negotiable, unlike other heterological situations (gender, class, sexual preference), and power is inevitably self- reproducing. (203) Thus aetonormativity, one of the prevailing theories of children’s literature, posits an iron-clad power hierarchy between adult and child. Even later adjustments to aetonormativity (Gubar; Beauvais) that position the difference between adult and child as one of ‘degree, not of kind’ (Gubar 454) insist that aetonormativity must be at least somewhat preserved to the extent that it ‘[justifies] an array of protective measures that cannot be dismissed as merely oppressive’ (454). Gubar’s comment is particularly telling, as it avoids negating aetonormativity’s oppressive action while redirecting the reader’s attention towards our own ‘dismissal’ of opposition to the theory. The adult-child power binary endures, a stasis sharply juxtaposed with other ‘heterological situations,’ which have undergone increasingly public and political destabilisation over the last century. Why does aetonormativity resist the type of deconstruction that has been productively applied to other power binaries? More precisely, why do scholars of children’s literature seem not only to resist a meaningful critique of aetonormativity but moreover to dismiss one as impossible (cf. Nodelman; Flynn)? I suspect the answer has to do with Stephen Thomson’s description of the conceptual child’s ‘particular risk of being hypostatized’ (357). Nikolajeva overtly hypostasises the child, as a component of the adult-child binary, in her definition of aetonormativity. More conservatively, Gubar takes the ‘risk’ of ‘talking about actual children’ (450), unknowingly echoing Thomson by becoming ‘entangled in the idea that there are real children at stake’ (Thomson 355) when we discuss the conceptual child. Thomson, conversely, suggests: that one needs to insist upon the conceptuality of ‘child’, in an attempt to wrest the object from its self-evidence and make it available for a sort of thinking through which, though it remains involved in issues that exercise the practical, does not take the practical as its telos. (356) Thomson here insists that the conceptual child be made available for a “thinking through,” but he stops short at defining what, in particular, needs to be thought through. I posit that the conceptual child, unhypostatised, has a central role to play in thinking through a posthumanist deconstruction of aetonormativity, thus becoming a posthumanist child. In this becoming, the posthumanist child shows us the generative possibilities for rethinking childhood that arise when we destabilise aetonormativity. The posthumanist child remains hidden under a veritable maelstrom of analytical demands. Firstly, we must decenter the human by interrogating and dismantling humanist power hierarchies; secondly, the power hierarchy between adults and children is non-negotiable and in fact fundamentally beneficial for both parties; thirdly, this non-negotiable power structure essentialises the material child while doing away with the conceptual one, which should, fourthly, remain available for ‘thinking through’. If we are able to pause and allow all of these tensions to balance at once, we can find the posthumanist child, itself an inherent contradiction- in-terms on several fundamental levels. I highlight this tension because my aim here is not to resolve it, but rather to use the energy within it to power the forward momentum of my examination. In this I follow Donna Haraway, who uses the optical metaphor of diffraction to describe her approach: Diffraction does not produce ‘the same’ displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear. (“Promises” 70) Instead of merely observing the differences between the theories at play in order to resolve them, I intend to map the effects of these differences in order to reveal a figure called the posthumanist child, a figure that emerges out of the effects of difference, out of the type of diffraction caused by the force of deconstruction colliding against the rock of aetonormativity. I do this using Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio, a canonical children’s story whose titular protagonist ‘can easily be perceived through the prism of technological change and shifting conceptions of the human in modern times’ (Pizzi 13), arguing that one of the shifting conceptions of the human implicated in the posthuman figure of Pinocchio is a shift in our conception of aetonormativity. From Pinocchio, I suggest a way forward for reconsidering the child and childhood that avoids hypostatisation while still attending to material conditions and to the binary-destabilising action of posthumanist thought. Derrida and the Pharmakon-Child: Deconstruction as play Ursula K. Le Guin recommends that ‘if you want to clear a room of Derrideans, mention Beatrix Potter without sneering’ (1). On the contrary, I find that Derrida’s historical unpopularity in some circles heralds a productive pairing of his work with children’s literature, a category of writing that has itself achieved scant academic approval. Indeed, I argue that there is much about Derrida’s ‘metaphysics of fragments’ (Hassan 833), that favors its usage in an accounting of a posthumanist child. A diffractive reading of Nikolajeva’s original conception of aetonormative theory through Thomson’s useful essay confirms the sense that Derrida and childhood are closely and productively connected. Thomson performs an admirable round-up of the major appearances of the child in Derrida’s oeuvre, noting that: [In Derrida’s writing,] 'child' is not generally cited as a concept or given the status of a theme, and it is rarely, if ever, flagged in the indices and headings of commentaries. And where the child is discussed, it tends to figure in the most anecdotal, empirical sense. (338) In rectifying this oversight, Thomson does not draw an overt connexion between deconstruction and childhood, instead claiming that the concept of the ‘“child” names and thematises in Derrida that which cannot just

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